The Bizarro World of Network TV in 2020

If you’ve been following my blog or listened to my old podcast Couch Taters, you might know that I have a penchant for what I’m calling Domino’s Pizza TV—it’s cheesy, it’s definitely not good, and I always wish I had spent my time doing something else. But I’ll be damned if I’m not skipping the plate and shoving that cardboard bread directly into my mouth.

Bad TV™ is something of an obsession for me. What makes it so cringy? Why do we love that cringe? Why does it feel like one of those computer algorithms you train to write a script? My theory? With the rise of streaming and with so many shows to watch, shows that try to appeal to a lowest common denominator tend to feel just plain weird compared to the shows that have a hyper-specific audience in mind.

These days, network television is the mecca for this type of content. CBS is the gold standard for out-of-touch TV, aiming at an audience that doesn’t have a long shelf life, but my personal favorite is ABC, a network trying to strike the balance, appealing to younger audiences without alienating its older viewership.

The Bachelor franchise is a great example of this. The show rose to prominence in middle America but found new life as all of its cast members became Instagram celebrities each season. Grey’s Anatomy has been able to maintain its popularity with younger viewers, despite overall numbers waning, in part due to the show’s inclusion on Netflix.

And that all sets the stage for what I want to talk about today, which is how weird network TV is in 2020.

Many shows are returning after having been postponed due to COVID restrictions, and filming under these circumstances has understandably changed production practices, leading to some really weird scenes. The finale of Supernatural, a culmination of 15 years of storytelling pitted its central heroes against vampires in cheap Halloween masks. The pandemic seems to be raging in some of the Chicago Med/PD/Fire shared universe, and not in others. The Bachelorette, a show that usually travels the globe, is taking place on a singular resort in California. Meredith Grey has coronavirus.

In fact, how to deal with the virus is not just a production problem in 2020, it seems to be something that shows want to write about. But because these shows were written and shot much earlier in the year, it’s becoming a very weird time machine for remembering how much more seriously we were taking things a few months ago.

On my favorite Bad TV™ show, A Million Little Things, we’re starting to see the pandemic pop up in the background on TV screens like it’s the beginning of a zombie apocalypse movie. Grey’s Anatomy (and yes, I’m judging the entire season based on the final 10 minutes of the premiere I watched while I waited for A Million Little Things to return) is all about COVID. Characters are wearing masks all the time, and a husband and wife had outdoor sex while 25 feet apart as a pandemic precaution.

The result is this really weird uncanny valley. Usually these shows are removed from our own. They end each hour in a neat little bow, they say cheesy things like “friendship is a million little things,” and they never deal with anything that would polarize any segment of the American population at large. These are shows that only tackle social issues once they’re mainstream, because, well, they are the mainstream.

It really hammers home how incredibly widespread the pandemic is. I know, duh. Of course we all know the numbers. We all have seen the news. We all haven’t seen our families in months (if you’re doing things right). And because of that isolation, it can be easy to forget that this is something that we are all going through in millions of little bubbles across the globe, and that it’s something that we all felt much more viscerally a few months ago.

US cases are skyrocketing and reaching all-time highs in both daily new cases and deaths. Yet our public policy is far, far more tame than it was back in March. Back then, with a fraction of the damage, we shut down and stayed home for weeks. It was an incredible personal cost meant to buy time for a more comprehensive government response. We got paid to stay home in the form of unemployment bonuses and stimulus checks.

Then we got tired. We started questioning the legitimacy of the disease. We opened restaurants. We just wanted it to end.

So it’s really bizarre to see these people on network television, the ones who peddle in the vanilla, to take the pandemic far more seriously than we are today. These are the shows that play it safe, the ones that don’t rock the boat. They steer away from third-rail issues, ignoring even the ones that impact our everyday lives (healthcare, poverty, racism).

Television is incredibly reactive compared to its big brother film, so it could be that in a few months these shows will see the issue vanish as the production schedules collide with coronavirus politicization. But it could also be that this is just such a no-brainer that even network TV can get it right.

Wear your masks and wear them right.